I have past experience with Autotools and native development, but am a newbie to doing it inside Eclipse. I tried CDT many years ago, back in a time when it didn't have Autotools support. I've spent a couple of half-days trying to figure this out and am posting here as a last resort. My apologies in advance if I am missing something obvious!

The first thing I tried was importing an existing Autotools project that builds under OS X 10.7.3 with the Xcode 4.3.1 command line tools installed. I was not successful with that so I tried creating a new project from the "Hello World C++ Project" project type and was not successful with that either. Is this forum a good place to try and resolve issues like this?

When I create a new project, CDT creates the skeleton source tree and I am able to build it from inside Eclipse after running "automake --add-missing" and "autoreconf" from the command line. (It seems like that shouldn't be necessary in an ideal world, but don't want to get sidetracked there...)

When I try to run the executable from inside Eclipse, I get a lot of "command not found" errors. www.badprog.com/c-eclipse-installation-of-c-c-development-tools-cdt-and-cygwin-for-windows provided some helpful information for Eclipse, and I set up a run profile pointing to the a.out binary that was created by the build. It runs without the debugger, but not with the debugger. Getting to a stable edit-build-debug cycle is my primary objective at this point, so this one is rather important to me :-)

Is OS X a supported platform for CDT development with Autotools and C++? It seems like there are some rough edges (Makefile.am containing "bin_PROGRAMS=a.out" instead of the project name, program name not showing up in list of programs for instance), but then not being able to connect to gdb is a little worrisome. Most of my last ten plus years of experience is with IntelliJ IDEA, and I'd like to use CDT because it seems like it's going to be the most comfortable C++ environment for me.

Do any of these problems sound familiar to anyone? I'm grateful for any assistance or insights others could share!

The Autotools plug-ins have not been tested under OS X. That said, they are not restricted from running there and probably should just work. The CDT does support OS X. Can you elaborate your experience in trying to import an existing Autotools project? I assume you specified the Empty Project under GNU Autotools for your project. What happened then?

Thanks for the response, but unfortunately I gave up on this and went back to what I know well in the Java world. As the project evolved, it probably made the most sense. I'll give it a shot at some other point in the future, I'm sure.